ReMynd vs Screenpipe

The verdict up front: these are the two credible local-first options, and they are aimed at different people. Screenpipe is a source-available, cross-platform toolkit for people who want to own and extend the whole stack. ReMynd is a polished Mac-native app for people who want screen memory to work in sixty seconds and then get out of the way. Neither is a compromised version of the other.

If you are reading this expecting a hatchet job on the competitor whose code you can read, you will be disappointed. Screenpipe is good, and pretending otherwise would be both dishonest and easy to check.

What Screenpipe gets right

Its source is public and written in Rust, running on macOS, Windows and Linux. Every line that touches your screen history is readable. It is no longer MIT licensed: the code is under the Screenpipe Commercial License, free for personal, non-commercial, non-profit, educational and research use, with a paid licence required for commercial use. Official builds come with a free plan and paid tiers: Basic at $21 a month and Business at $42 a seat a month (pricing). For a tool whose entire job is watching everything you do, that is not a small thing — it is arguably the strongest privacy guarantee available, because it does not require trusting anyone's marketing copy.

Its capture design is smarter than brute force. Rather than screenshotting on a timer, it listens for meaningful events — app switches, clicks, typing pauses, scrolling — and captures when something actually changes, pairing each screenshot with the accessibility tree the OS already exposes. That keeps CPU around 5–10% and disk around 5–10 GB a month.

It also has a real plugin system ("pipes", TypeScript on Deno) and a developer API, so if your instinct on seeing a screen-memory tool is "I want to build on this", Screenpipe is built for exactly that.

The comparison

Choose Screenpipe if…

You want to audit or extend the code. This is the decisive reason and it is a good one.

You are on Windows or Linux, where ReMynd simply does not run.

You are building something — an agent, an internal tool, a workflow — on top of continuous capture, and you want an API and a plugin system rather than a finished product.

You would rather spend an afternoon on setup than pay, and your use fits its free plan or its licence's free-use terms (personal, non-commercial, educational, research).

Choose ReMynd if…

You want it to work now. Install, grant screen-recording permission once, and hit Control + Space. No model configuration, no API keys, no docker, no reading a README to find out what is captured.

You want the calls in the same timeline as the screen, transcribed and searchable next to everything else, rather than assembling mic capture into something useful yourself.

You want the agent layer — something that reasons across everything you have captured and then writes the report or builds the thing, rather than a substrate you build that on.

And you want someone to email when it breaks.

The honest summary

If you are technical, privacy-maximalist, and enjoy owning your tooling, Screenpipe is likely your answer and you should take it. If you want the same local-first guarantee delivered as a finished Mac product, that is what we built.

Screenpipe's licence and prices are from its own pages, checked 18 October 2026: licence, pricing, screenpi.pe.

Both of us are arguing the same underlying case against the cloud-first incumbents — see the wider field of Rewind alternatives — and you are better off with either than with a service that holds your memory on its own servers.